Moraen Karthveil: The Listener of Khor’Mhalok

Moraen Karthveil had always heard the bones sing.

In Khor’Mhalok, where the ribcage of the fallen Titan Theramos arched across the horizon like a bleached cathedral, no one found that strange. The wind moved through hollowed vertebrae and whistled through marrow-etched corridors, and the Ossuary Triune called it the shard’s breath. But Moraen heard more than wind. He heard names.

He was born beneath the Maw Bastion, where bone-sculptors carved memory-runes into Titan ivory. His mother etched warnings into femur-pillars; his father served among the Ghulvorn Vigil, mapping pulse tremors that shuddered through the grave-shard. From childhood, Moraen would press his ear to the curved walls of the rib-vaults and listen to whispers that were not his own.

They told him of hunger.

They told him of chains.

They told him the Titan was not entirely dead.

When the first bone-quake struck that winter, splitting the White Dune Archives and sending dust-etched histories into the air like ash-snow, Moraen knew the tremor was not natural. The Hollowforged Sentinels marched in disciplined silence, their metal limbs gleaming with reflected bone-light, while the Ossuary Triune proclaimed stability. Yet beneath the proclamation, the ribcage hummed a single word over and over.

Moraen.

He tried to ignore it. He apprenticed as a pulse-mapper, tracing Titan tremors along carved sigil-lines and predicting which districts might fracture next. But the humming deepened. The Choir of Hollow Voices, once a cavern of distant echoes, began to resonate with his heartbeat. When he entered the cavern alone, the walls vibrated, and the sound shaped itself into language.

“You are not of the living alone,” it said.

Visions struck him like falling bone-dust: a colossal eye opening beneath ash dunes; cultists in marrow masks kneeling around a stolen knucklebone; a shard splitting free from Vael’Thera and drifting toward the Hollow Verge.

The Maw Devout were awakening something.

Moraen followed the tremors beyond the outer bone ridges, where Titan-hunters rarely patrolled. There, in a ravine shaped like a broken jaw, he found them, figures chanting in rhythm with the shard’s pulse. At the center lay a fragment of Theramos’s knucklebone, etched with fresh runes and slick with ash-alchemy.

The bone was beating.

Not loudly. Not fully. But enough.

Moraen felt the answer rise in his blood. The bones had sung to him all his life not because he was chosen, but because he was listening. He stepped into the ravine and pressed his palm against the knucklebone.

The world fractured.

For a breathless moment, he stood in the Hollow Verge. Titan remnants loomed like mountains of shadow. He saw Theramos as it once was, vast, hungering, chained by Mechanarch latticework. He understood then that resurrection was not rebirth. It was rupture.

When he returned to himself, the cultists lay scattered, their ritual circle cracked by a surge of bone-echo magic that had burst from his touch. The knucklebone had split, its pulse stilled.

But the humming did not stop.

It changed.

Now, the ribcage of Khor’Mhalok sang not of hunger, but of warning. The Titan’s corpse was a prison, and the prison was thinning. Moraen carried that knowledge back to the Maw Bastion, ash coating his boots, resolve hardening in his chest.

The Ossuary Triune would not believe him easily. The Hollowforged would question him. The Ghulvorn would demand proof.

Yet the bones would continue to sing.

And Moraen Karthveil, listener of the grave-shard, would answer every tremor, until the day the Titan either rose… or finally fell silent.